Information on the web exists in the form of hyperlinks that appear in different web sites. A news site for example may contain headlines that are hyperlinks to their detailed exposition.
Custom Internet portals to display web-centric information exist (e.g., myYahoo, myLycos etc.). The level of customization is however, fairly minimal. In typical portals, the user chooses from a pre-determined set of headlines collected from a pre-determined set of web-sites. The user has no control over either the web-sites he/she gets the data from or the headlines that are taken from those web-sites. Further, the user has very little control over how the information is presented. Even further, the user has little or no control over how he or she interacts with the information.
A further problem is that a user currently has no way of applying functions universally to data collected on such a portal. For example, with the advent of mobile devices, the current shift in communications is to allow access to data on the Internet by mobile devices. Current methods of delivering web-based data to mobile devices, however, requires that each site have data formatted for display on the particular mobile device. Accordingly, a significant engineering investment is required on a web-site by web-site basis to enable each web-site to become mobilized. This is the biggest bottleneck in the mobile enabling of the web.
What is needed is a way to universally apply functions to all data (all content and applications) on the Internet, from any location in the world. In the mobilization example what is needed is a way to mobilize such data by aggregating user selected data at one site (e.g., a habitat) and making that selected data mobile-device enabled. The single site (habitat) thus behaves as a gateway between the wireless and wired web.
Prior art portals also fail to provide voice-based interaction with the content or applications in the portal. In particular, prior art portals have yet to provide the capability for speech-based interaction, including acting on a user's vocal commands and providing speech output. Thus what is needed is a way to allow the user to interact with any content/application dragged into a voice-enabled container. What is further needed is a way to create voice alerts that cause the user to be notified via a mobile device such as a telephone.
Utilizing the present invention, the entire world wide web and/or other network can be wireless/intelligence/speech enabled without requiring an engineering investment on a website by website basis.